Cool shelves

For the last few years Z-man, Supergirl and myself have been living in a two bedroom apartment and shortly before Halloween 2008 we were offered a spot in a housing cooperative, a 3-bedroom townhouse, and we jumped at the chance to move. It was great for everyone to have a room to themselves finally! With the help of some great friends and family we packed up and were on the move.

Once we got everything in I got the chance to haul out all the boxes of books that I did not have the room for in the apartment. This is what it looked like in our living room for the first month after we moved in:

(yes, those boxes are all full of books!)

It was time to start looking at unpacking these but to do that I needed a shelving system. I could have gone with a straight forward L-bracket and plank shelving system but wanted something a little different so I did what everyone does to find something now-a-days, I Googled and found this site that gave me a starting point

“30-of-the-most-creative-bookshelves-designs”

The first thing I needed was some concrete forming tubes (I know, you are thinking “WHAT?!” but it will all become clear in time, just trust me). For those who may not know what concrete forming tubes are they are just like the cardboard tubes that wrapping paper is wrapped around, just on a MUCH bigger scale, 8 feet long, 1.5 feet in diameter.

The next step was to cut them down into smaller sections that would be used for the shelving sections. This took a few days but thanks to a loan of a really great saw from Lee Valley Tools from my Dad it went pretty quick.

You can tell from the picture above the tubes are not really all that much to look at so they needed to be painted. This is a job for Supergirl!

Z-man decided that he had other things to do so didn’t participate in this particular project but Supergirl did enough for two. Ariel looked quite a bit different by the time she was finished!

Now that all the individual pieces were painted it was time to start assembling.

Now are you starting to see?

Supergirl pitched in at this stage too:

Then it was time for the finishing touch. Z-man did stand still to model for his outline as did Supergirl, although she did day that I made hers taller than she really is!

Pretty much sums up life in our house!

Obviously not ALL the books fit, but a select few are out and it leaves me another DIY project for the future!